Small line of customers outside a branch of Northern Rock – a Mortgage specialist and a top UK mortgage lender – in North Street, Brighton, East Sussex. The business (a former “savings and loan” type Building Society which was demutualised in 1997) has been affected in part by problems in the US “subprime” lending market. Picture taken late on Friday afternoon on 14th September 2007. Source: Northern Rock Queue. Foto: Dominic Alves from Brighton, England. Crative Commons.

Late-2000s recession
“This article is about economic recession during the early twenty-first century.”

Sites

Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR)
“CEPR was established in 1999 [by Dean Baker and Mark Weisbrot] to promote democratic debate on the most important economic and social issues that affect people’s lives.”

In depth: The future of capitalism (March 5, 2009- )
“The credit crunch has destroyed faith in the free market ideology that has dominated Western economic thinking for a generation … Over the coming weeks we will conduct a wide-ranging debate.”

In depth: Global financial crisis
“A multimedia snapshow of one of the most radical reshapings of the global banking sector.”

Marx and the Financial Crisis of 2008
“This blog [edited by Andrew Chitty] aims to collect materials (especially online materials) on the contribution Marxian theory can make to understanding the causes of the financial crisis of 2008.”

Radical Perspectives on the Crisis
“On this site we will post all the useful information we can find on understanding and grappling with whatever capitalism will throw at us during this exceptional period, as well as seeking exit strategies in the struggles which develop.”

Articles

Against the Current

Hillel Ticktin: Brief theory of the present crisis (No.153, July-August 2011)
“This article is a summary and development of the argument that I have been writing in the journal Critique, both in the Critique Notes and a number of articles … Today there is a real structural crisis of the system itself, not just a particular cyclical downturn/upturn.”

Tony Smith: Inside the global crisis (No.150, January-February 2011). Review article.
“The works under review present the clear view that the present crisis is rooted in the ‘deep structure’ of the existing social order. More specifically, there is broad agreement among these authors that persisting overproduction began to plague the global economy in the 1970s, manifested in significant overcapacity in all major non-financial sectors.”

Jon Amsden: Analyzing the Crash (No.149, November/December 2010). Review of Jack Rasmus, Epic Recession: Prelude to Global Depression (Pluto Press, 2010)
“What Jack Rasmus has reminded us in this exhaustively researched and highly provocative book on the current crisis is that it is once again time to start talking seriously about radical economic, social, and political change in the United States.”

Barry Finger: The limits of state intervention (No.147, July/August 2010)
“My purpose here is not to argue whether socialists should or should not endorse specific measures relieving unemployment … I do question, however, the left Keynesian understanding of the roots of capitalist crises and the apparently noncontradictory nature of state intervention.”

Ismael Hossein-Zadeh: Making sense of this economic crisis (No.146, May/June 2010)
“The following study, using the Marxian analysis of ‘finance capital’ (Hilferding), looks beyond the incidental or instrumental roles played by the agents or market players … Instead, it focuses on the built-in dynamics of the accumulation of ‘finance capital as self-expanding value’ (Marx).”

Charlie Post: Exploring the roots of the crisis (No.141, July/August 2009)
“What follow is a very brief outline presentation of the four main radical and Marxist theories of crisis … After presenting each theory, I will attempt to evaluate them in terms of their political implications, logical structure, and factual/empirical validity.”

Jack Rasmus: The many faces of bank nationalization (No.140, May/June 2009)
“Who benefits in any nationalization arrangement is the key: is it the ‘nation at large’ or is it some set of private individuals? It is called ‘NATIONalization’ for a reason. To call it nationalization, while in the service of individual investors, is to appropriate and distort the meaning of the term.”

The economy in a world of trouble. Interview with Robert Brenner (No.139, March/April 2009)
“The current crisis is more serious than the worst previous recession of the postwar period, between 1979 and 1982, and could conceivably come to rival the Great Depression, though there is no way of really knowing. Economic forecasters have underestimated how bad it is because they have overestimated the strength of the real economy …”

Howard Brick: Is Anti-Capitalism enough? The new crisis & the left (No.138, January-February 2009). Review of The New Spirit of Capitalism
by Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello (Verso, 2006)
“It is the great ambition of The New Spirit of Capitalism to diagnose the peculiar shape that capitalism has assumed since the 1970s, to explain how and why its new forms have eluded a forceful, concentrated challenge, and to venture proposals for reinvigorating, indeed reinventing an effective anticapitalist critique.”

The Asia-Pacific Journal

Overproduction not financial collapse is the heart of the crisis: the US, East Asia, and the world (Vol.6, No.1, 2009)
“Marxist economic historian Robert Brenner offers a critique of the capitalist system, and describes the source of today’s economic crisis as an overcapacity in global manufacturing that is being replicated in Asian countries, thereby perpetuating the crisis. The downward slide toward an asset-price Keynesianism, or ‘bubblenomics’, has also contributed to the current state of the global economy and proposes that the only way out of the crisis is crisis itself.”

Boston Review

How to fix the economy: Redirecting a wayward system (January/February 2009)
“A special issue on repairing the U.S. economy”: articles by Dean Baker, Jeff Madrick and Robert Pollin.

The Bullet

Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin: From global finance tothe nationalization of the banks: Eight teses on the economic crisis (No.189, February 25, 2009)
“The scale of the crisis today is such that nationalization of the financial system cannot be kept off the political agenda. It is increasingly apparent, that monetary and fiscal stimulation alone are unlikely to succeed in ending the crisis …”

David Harvey: Why the U.S. stimulus package is bound to fail (No.184,
February 12, 2009)
“Much is to be gained by viewing the contemporary crisis as a surface eruption generated out of deep tectonic shifts in the spatio-temporal disposition of capitalist development.”

CounterPunch

Michael Hudson: Why the U.S. has launched a new financial world war – and how the the rest of the world will fight back (October 11, 2010)
“Finance is the new form of warfare – without the expense of a military overhead and an occupation against unwilling hosts.”

Michael Hudson: The language of looting (February 23, 2009)
“The rhetoric of ‘free markets’, ‘nationalization’ and even ‘socialism’ (as in ‘socializing the losses’) has been turned into the language of deception to help the financial sector mobilize government power to support its own special privileges.”

Fifth International

Special issue: Marx, money and the modern world: finance capital and imperialism today (pdf) (Vol.3, No.4, 2010, 161 p.)
“This anthology seeks to do link together two things: the contradictions of the global economic system and the developing tensions and frictions in international
relations with the rise of new global powers.”

The Great Recession:
Profit cycles, economic crisis: A Marxist view. By Michael Roberts (London, 2009, 322 p., Lulu.com – print on demand)
“This book aims to explain why the Great Recession happened, in what
form it took and what will happen next. As such, it is divided into three
parts: before, during and after the Great Recession. It takes the form of a
collection of essays [2005-2009], some of which have been published elsewhere and some unpublished.”
See:

Rob Sewell: Capitalist crisis deepens: no recovery in sight as economy heads for depression (8 September 2011)
“The world crisis of capitalism has entered a new stage. Rather than recover, several countries are showing features of a depression. This is an unprecedented situation and shows the deep malaise affecting the capitalist system, still reeling from the slump of 2008-9.”

International Socialism

Alex Callinicos: Legends of the fall (Issue 160, Autumn 2018, p.3-18)
“… the weak recovery that followed the slump and the probability of another crisis are also in everyone’s minds. These subjects are systematically explored in Adam Tooze’s mammoth critical history of the crisis, Crashed. Tooze challenges what became the conventional view after the worst of the eurozone crisis seemed to have passed in 2012 …”

Joseph Choonara: The political economy of the long depression (Issue 158, Spring 2018, p.81-110)
“The recession of 2008-9 was a long-deferred crisis for the system … The fact that it was not allowed to become a slump on the scale of the 1930s has given us instead a long depression—a prolonged period of relatively sluggish and tentative growth.”

Alex Callinicos: The crisis of our time (Issue 132, Autumn 2011, p.3-17)
This is the crisis of our times – George Magnus’s ‘once-in-a-generation crisis of capitalism’. There is no sign of it ending, and much evidence that it will get worse.”

Guglielmo Carchedi: Behind and beyond the crisis (Issue 132, Autumn 2011, p.121-155)
“The 2007 financial crisis has reignited the discussion on crises, their origin and possible remedies. At present the most influential thesis on the left sees the crisis as caused by underconsumption and recommends Keynesian policies as a solution. This paper argues that we should understand the crisis from the perspective of Karl Marx’s ‘law of the tendential fall in the average rate of profit’ (ARP), for short ‘the law’.”

Joseph Choonara: Once more (with feeling) on Marxist accounts of the crisis (Issue 132, Autumn 2011, p.157-174)
“David McNally’s Global Slump and the latest Socialist Register add to the growing body of Marxist literature on the current crisis of capitalism.1 Here I will focus on the former work but utilise some of the essays in the latter, which contains an eclectic series of takes on the crisis, to make my case.”

Joseph Choonara: Decoding capitalism (Issue 129, Winter 2011, p.137-149). Review of David Harvey, The Enigma of Capital (Profile, 2010)
“David Harvey ranks today among the world’s most renowned Marxist theoreticians. His fame is thoroughly deserved. Few red professors have his gift for presenting sophisticated ideas with such clarity or his commitment to exploring the central questions of the moment.”

Jane Hardy: Crisis and recession in Central and Eastern Europe (Issue 128, Autumn 2010)
“Despite the virtual implosion of some economies in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) – plunging living standards in parts of the region, protests and social unrest – little attention has been paid to the crisis and recession in the ten post-Communist countries that joined the European Union (EU) in 2004 and 2006.”

Chris Harman: Not all Marxism is dogmatism: A reply to Michel Husson [on profit rates and crisis] (Issue 125, Winter 2010, p.95-112)
“This paper was written for a recent conference in Amsterdam organised by the Fourth International.” See also Michel Husson: The debate on the rate of profit (International Viewpoint, Issue 426, July 2010)

Guglielmo Carchedi: Zombie Capitalism and the origin of crises (Issue 125, Winter 2010)
Second in a series of responses to Chris Harman’s latest book, Zombie Capitalism: Global Crisis and the Relevance of Marx.

Andrew Kliman: Pinning the blame on the system (Issue 124, Autumn 2009, p.85-94)
First in a series of responses to Chris Harman’s latest book, Zombie Capitalism: Global Crisis and the Relevance of Marx.

Joseph Choonara: Marxist accounts of the current crisis (Issue 123, Summer 2009, p.81-110)
“Here I consider widely accessible accounts that have appeared in English over the past few months, appraising their strengths and weaknesses relative to each other and to the tradition associated with this journal.”

Charlie Kimber: Precarious reflections (Issue 123, Summer 2009, p.198-201). Review of Kevin Doogan, New Capitalism? The Transformation of Work (Polity, 2009)
“The book is particularly harsh on Michael Hardt and Tony Negri for providing ‘the presence of left wing harmonies in the neoliberal chorus’. Doogan insists that such dreamers should submit to a statistical cold shower.”

Alex Callinicos: An apologist with insights (Issue 122, Spring 2009, p.101-114). Review of Martin Wolf, Fixing Global Finance: How to Curb Financial Crises in the 21st Century (2009)
“Wolf is one of the intellectual swells of neoliberalism. Chief economic commentator of the Financial Time … But, although Wolf is undoubtedly one of what Karl Marx called ‘the hired prize-fighters’ of international capitalism, he is very far from being a fool.”

Chris Harman: The slump of the 1930s and the crisis today (Issue 121, Winter 2009, p.21-48)
“What is the real character of the present meltdown and what are its implications? Chris Harman compares today’s crisis with that of 1929-33 to provide some answers.”

Bill Dunn: Myths of globalisation and the new economy (Issue 121, Winter 2009, p.75-97)
“Much of the left accepts one element in ‘third way’ ideology. This is the claim that globalisation has fundamentally weakened workers’ capacity to fight. Bill Dunn marshals a mass of material to show why this argument is wrong.” See also Paul Blackledge’s book review: Questioning post-Fordism (Issue 113, Winter 2007)

International Socialist Review

Where is capitalism headed?: Marxists look at the world economy. By Hadas Thier, David McNally, Lee Wengraf, Lee Sustar and Michael Roberts (Issue 110, Fall 2018, p.47-69)
“The financial crisis in 2007 thrust the world economy into the deepest downswing since the Great Depression … The ISR asked a group of Marxist economists to assess the character of our economic epoch and its trajectory.”

Claudio Katz: Interpretations of the economic crisis (Issue 75, January–February 2011)
“In the two years since the economic crisis began, explanations of what happened continue to be dominated by a point/counterpoint between neoliberals and Keynesians … In the face of these arguments a space has begun to open for another interpretation with Marxist roots, which attributes the upheaval to the inherent imbalances of capitalism.”

David McNally: The mutating crisis of global capitalism (Issue 73, September-October 2010)
“My view is that this is the first global and systemic crisis of the neoliberal phase of capitalism. When I say it’s systemic, I mean that it’s not just a crisis in one sector. It’s not just a real estate or housing crisis. It’s not just a banking crisis. It is a systemic crisis.”

Petrino DiLeo: The crisis and its roots (Issue 66, July-August 2009). Review of John Bellamy Foster and Fred Magdoff, The Great Financial Crisis: Causes and Consequences (Monthly Review Press, 2009)
“The book is an important contribution in developing a Marxist account of the current crisis and its roots. Its strongest points include its description of the rise of financialization in the past thirty year … For better or for worse, however, the authors continue in the framework that Baran and Sweezy originally laid out in the 1966 text, Monopoly Capital.”

Fred Moseley: The U.S. economic crisis: Causes and solutions (Issue 64, March-April 2009)
“This article analyzes the underlying causes of the current crisis, estimates how bad the crisis is likely to be … [and] the final section makes recommendations for more radical government policies that the left should advocate and support in response to this crisis.”

Petrino DiLeo: The return of Keynes? (Issue 63, January-February 2009)
“Is Keynesian state intervention the solution to the free-market meltdown? Petrino DiLeo looks at the real record of Keynesian policy.”

International Viewpoint

Francois Chesnais: The roots of the world economic crisis (Issue 445, February 2012)
“The European financial crisis is the expression in the sphere of finance of the situation of semi-paralysis in which the world capitalist economy finds itself.”

Claudio Katz: A worldwide game of chess”¦ with no winner (Issue 444, January 2012)
“The developed economies have entered a new recessive phase of the crisis which began in 2007. The rebound obtained thanks to public spending is exhausted and the next relapse will be marked by a strong rise in unemployment. To get back to at least the level of employment that existed before the crisis it would have been necessary to create 17 million jobs in the world, but public treasuries are exhausted by the aid given to the banks.”

Michel Husson: A crisis without end (Issue 439, August 2011)
“As this article was being completed, two major crises shook capitalism and made the stock markets plunge: the sovereign debt crisis in Europe, together with the debt ceiling cliff-hanger in the United States … The aim of this article is to survey the recent trajectory of capitalism and examine its implications for the period opened by the crisis.”

Michel Husson: The debate on the rate of profit (Issue 426, July 2010)
“A polemic on the rate of profit has developed over the last few months. This article seeks to review this debate which turns around four essential questions.” See also Chris Harman: Not all Marxism is dogmatism (International Socialism, Issue 125, Winter 2010) + Andrew Kliman: Master of words (Marxist-Humanist Initiative, February 20, 2010)

Michael Husson: China-USA: The uncertain aftermath of the crisis (Issue 415, August 2009)
“It is now time to pose the question of what comes after the crisis. Not because it is ending, as we are led to believe by the on-message optimists whose sole concern is that everything goes back to what it was before, but because it is useful to identify the obstacles which a possible recovery will come up against.”

Francois Sabado: The crisis overdetermines all of world politics: Taking the measure of the crisis (2) (Issue 410, March 2009)
“We will not repeat here a whole series of explanations of the mechanisms of the crisis, but insist rather on a series of questions which are posed by it.”

Thadeus Pato: Keynes reloaded?: Keynes and climate change (Issue 409, February 2009)
“According to Karl Marx historic tragedies repeat as a farce. Considering, what is nowadays labelled as ‘Neo-Keynesianism’ concerning the official crisis management of the bourgeois state, one gets the impression, that what Keynes intended originally, in fact is re-performed as a farce.”

Jim Porter: The sirens of protectionism (Issue 409, February 2009)
“The crisis of 1929 unleashed inter-imperialist trade conflicts which then contributed to transforming the crisis into a long depression and a world war. The capitalist crisis unleashed in 2008 will be all the deeper in that it has been delayed by a level of indebtedness without precedent in capitalism.”

Kritisk Debat

Fred Moseley: Time for permanent nationalization (March 2009)
“The Treasury Department’s recent bailouts of major U.S. banks will result in a massive transfer of income from taxpayers to those banks’ bondholders … The best way to avoid this legal robbery of taxpayers is to nationalize the banks. If taxpayers are going to pay for banks’ losses, then they should also receive their profits.”

Rick Wolff: Capitalism hits the fan: The current crisis did not start with finance, and it won’t end with finance (February 2009)
“Let me begin by saying what I think this crisis is not. It is not a financial crisis. It is a systemic crisis whose first serious symptom happened to be finance. But this crisis has its economic roots and its effects in manufacturing, services, and, to be sure, finance.”

Marxist-Humanist Initiative

Andrew Kliman: Lies, damned lies, and underconsumptionist statistics (September 16, 2010)
“The issues I’ll discuss below have to do with the underlying long-run causes of the crisis. Is the crisis ultimately rooted in contradictions of the capitalist system of production, or is it ultimately rooted – as the underconsumptionist camp claims – in falling pay for workers and/or a fall in their share of national income?”

Andrew Kliman: Appearance and essence: Neoliberalism, financialization, and the underlying crisis of capitalist production (May 17th, 2010)
“Some prominent Marxist and radical economists have argued that ‘neoliberal’ policies and increased exploitation have led to a substantial recovery of profitability since the early 1980s. They therefore dismiss the idea that a persistent fall in profitability is an underlying cause of capitalism’s latest economic crisis. Instead, they typically regard the crisis as an irreducibly financial one … This paper will challenge that thesis.”

Andrew Kliman: Master of words: Reply to Michel Husson on the character of the latest economic crisis (February 20, 2010)
“This paper replies to Michel Husson’s critique of my study of movements in the rates of profit of U.S. corporations. I showed that rates of profit fell markedly, beginning in the late 1950s and continuing through the early 1980s, and that no sustainable rebound in profitability took place between the trough year of 1982 and the trough year of 2001.”

Andrew Kliman: On the roots of the current economic crisis and some proposed solutions (April 17, 2009)
“Some prominent radical economists and non-economists have denied that Marx’s theory of the tendential fall in the rate of profit helps to explain the current economic crisis. I want to begin by explaining why they dismiss this theory, and then argue, to the contrary, that the current crisis does have a lot to do with the tendential fall in the rate of profit as analyzed by Marx.”

Crashed: more the how, than the why (August 24, 2018)
Review of Adam Tooze, Crashed: How a decade of financial crises changed the world (Penguin, 2018, 720 p.): “Tooze’s new book makes a massive contribution to the economic history of the global financial crash of 2008-9 … It powerfully shows what happened and how, but in my view does not adequately show why it happened.” See also review by Yanis Varoufakis (The Guardian/Yyanisvaroufakis.eu, August 13, 2018) + review by Nick Beams: Adam Tooze’s Crashed: The limitations of a Left-liberal historian (World Socialist Web Site, 22 September 2018) + Alex Callinicos: Legends of the fall (International Socialism, Issue 160, Autumn 2018) + Adam Tooze’s site.

The causes of the Great Recession: mainstream and heterodox interpretations and the cherry pickers (pdf) (November 2013, 33 p.)
“This paper argues that the Marxist model of capitalism best explains the Great
Recession, rooted as it is in the inherent flaws in the capitalist production process
and then its indirect impact on the financial sector. This reveals how the proximate causes are related to the ultimate.”

John Bellamy Foster: The age of monopoly-finance capital (Vol.61, No.9, February 2010)
“It is thus doubly clear today that we are in a new phase of capitalism. In what follows, I shall attempt to outline the logic of this argument, as it evolved out of the work of Baran, Sweezy, and Harry Magdoff in particular, and how it relates to our present economic and social predicament.”

Fred Magdoff and Michael D. Yates: What needs to be done: A socialist view (Vol.61, No.6, November 2009)
“What is worth fighting for? Perhaps this severe recession offers us an opportunity to ask this question. This crisis has revealed the rotten foundation of our economy … It seems to us that there are many things worth fighting for. Here is a list for starters.”

John Bellamy Foster and Robert W. McChesney: Monopoly-Finance capital and the paradox of accumulation (Vol.61, No.5, October 2009)
“If the Great Recession has leveled off before plunging into the depths of a second Great Depression, it has nonetheless left the U.S. and world economies in shambles … Indeed, what economists most fear at this point is protracted economic stagnation or a long period of slow growth.”

John Bellamy Foster: A failed system: The world crisis of capitalist globalization and its impact on China (Vol.60, No.10, March 2009)
“Three critical contradictions make up the contemporary world crisis emanating from capitalist development: (1) the current Great Financial Crisis and stagnation/depression; (2) the growing threat of planetary ecological collapse; and (3) the emergence of global imperial instability associated with shifting world hegemony and the struggle for resources.”

MR Online

The great recession and its aftermath: causes vs. symptoms. By Fred Magdoff (06.02.2011)
“No matter where we look, whichever symptom we explore, it all leads back to the tendency of the economy to stagnation and how business and government respond to the stagnation.”

Interview with Argentine economist Claudio Katz (11.07.2009)
“The exit from the systemic crisis of capitalism needs to be political, and ‘a socialist project can mature in this turbulence’. So says the Argentine economist, philosopher, and sociologist Claudio Katz, who also warns that the ‘global economic situation is very serious and is going to have to hit bottom, and now we are but in the first moment of crisis’.”

Walden Bello: The global collapse: A non-orthodox view (20.02.2009)
“Week after week, we see the global economy contracting at a pace worse than predicted by the gloomiest analysts. We are now, it is clear, in no ordinary recession but are headed for a global depression that could last for many years.”

The Nation

Joseph Stiglitz: A bank bailout that works (March 23, 2009)
“American banks have polluted the economy; it’s a matter of equity and efficiency that they now be forced to clean it up.”

New Left Review

Wolfgang Streeck: The crises of democratic capitalism (Issue 71, September-October 2011)
“The roots of today’s Great Recession are usually located in the financial excesses of the 1990s. Wolfgang Streeck traces a much longer arc, from 1945 onwards, of tensions between the logic of markets and the wishes of voters – culminating, he argues, in the international tempest of debt that now threatens to submerge democratic accountability altogether beneath the storm-waves of capital.”

Gopal Balakrishnan: Speculations on the stationary state (Issue 59, September-October 2009)
“Will the present crisis issue in a new phase of accumulation, or a growthless ‘stationary state’? Gopal Balakrishnan charts epochal trends in world capitalism, and their imbrication with the debt-fuelled imbalances of the long downturn.”

R. Taggart Murphy: Bubblenomics (Issue 57, May-June 2009)
“Origins of the financial crisis in the global squeeze on labour, and the example of Japan’s lost decade.” Review of Graham Turner’s The Credit Crunch: Housing Bubbles, Globalisation and the Worldwide Economic Crisis (2008)

Peter Gowan: Crisis in the heartland (Issue 55, January-February 2009)
“Against mainstream accounts, Peter Gowan argues that the origins of the global financial crisis lie in the dynamics of the New Wall Street System that has emerged since the 1980s. Contours of the Atlantic model, and implications – geopolitical, ideological, economic – of its blow-out.”

New Politics

The world economic crisis: Labor’s response (Issue 47, Summer 2009)
“Special section about what has happened to the working class and labor unions internationally, and how they have – and have not – responded to the greatest financial crisis in capitalism we have witnessed in generations.” With articles by Dan La Botz, Au Loong Yu, Kim Moody and Boris Kagarlitsky.

New Socialist

David McNally: Is the global economy recovering?: Workers, profits and the ‘Great Recession’ (pdf) (Issue 2, 2009, 2009, p.4-8). Scroll ned.
“In a wide ranging examination of the state of the world economy, David McNally concludes that despite the giddiness of mainstream financial pundits, ‘for poor and working class people it is unlikely to feel like the economy has recovered for quite some time’.”

Permanent Revolution

Robert Brenner and the current crisis (pdf) (Issue 15, Winter 2010)
“Bill Jefferies lays bare some fundamental flaws in Brenner’s understanding of the world economy in a review of a recent paper.” See below: UCLA.

Keith Harvey: A twenty-first century crisis (Issue 11, Winter 2009)
“The US recession is deepening and spreading to other countries. Keith Harvey explains how the roots of the crisis lay in the feverish expansion of Asian capitalism and fundamental shifts in the nature of banking under neo-liberal globalisation.”

Red Pepper

David Harvey: Their crisis, our challenge (April/May 2009)
“In a far reaching interview with Red Pepper, David Harvey argues that the current financial crisis and bank bail-outs could lead to a massive consolidation of the banking system and a return to capitalist ”˜business as usual’ – unless there is sustained revolt and pressure for a dramatic redistribution and socialisation of wealth.”

Special feature: If not capitalism, what? (January 2009)
“Red Pepper put the question to five people who are working for a new society based on values of social and environmental justice: Leo Panitch, whose Renewing Socialism is reprinted this month in updated form, Robin Blackburn, author of Age Shock: How Finance is Failing Us, eco-socialist writers and activists Martin Ryle and Kate Soper, and Michel Bauwens, the director of the Peer to Peer Foundation.”

Socialism Today

Lynn Walsh: New phase in the great recession (Issue 151, Sept 2011)
“Capitalist strategists are filled with gloom at the prospect of a new economic downturn. Fear of recession in the US, its credit rating downgrade and political dysfunction, not to mention the ongoing eurozone crisis, Japanese stagnation and slowdown in China, have all led to convulsions on world stock markets.”

Lynn Walsh: Capitalism uncovered (Issue 150, July 2011)
“Ha-Joon Chang exposes today’s rapacious capitalism, dominated by finance and driven by short-term profit maximisation. He provides a devastating critique of the ideology of ”˜free-market’ economics. But while pointing to fundamental contradictions of the system, Chang draws back from a real alternative. A review of 23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism.”

Socialist Register

Theme: The crisis this time (Vol.47, 2011)
“This yearbook encompasses several themes, including putting the crisis in historical and theoretical perspective, analyzing the centrality of financialization in it and surveying its dimensions in the US, Europe, Japan and South Africa. The volume also examines the impact of the crisis on the working class both socially and politically …”
With Abstracts of 14 articles + Preface by Leo Panitch, Gregory Albo and Vivek Chibber online. See Anwar Shaikhs article online at his site: The first great depression of the 21st century (pdf).

Socialist Review

Structural problems of capitalism (Issue 340, October 2009)
“Economist and author Graham Turner talked to Socialist Review about his new book No Way to Run the Economy, why he believes Keynes is misunderstood and what he has learned from Marxist economics.”

Rachel Eborall: New Capitalism? (Issue 337, June 2009). A review of Kevin Doogan’s book (Polity Press, 2009)
“For years we have been told that through neoliberalism the global economy has changed fundamentally and in turn the labour market has been transformed … Kevin Doogan has decided to explore many of these accepted facts and explores whether these ideas have any basis in reality.”

Exploring the logic of capital (Issue 335, April 2009)
“Joseph Choonara spoke to acclaimed Marxist theoretician David Harvey about capitalism’s current crisis and his online reading group of Marx’s Capital which shows the revival of interest in this work.”

A structural crisis of the system (Issue 332, January 2009)
“István Mészáros won the 1971 Deutscher Prize for his book Marx’s Theory of Alienation and has written on Marxism ever since. He talks to Judith Orr and Patrick Ward about the current economic crisis.”

Socialist Worker (UK)

Capitalism’s crisis (Issue 2244, 26 March 2011)
“Socialist Worker asked Alex Callinicos to explain the continuing crisis of global capitalism – and whether governments will be able to make the working class pay for it.”

Socialist Worker (US)

David McNally: Financial meltdown: The sequel (September 26, 2011)
“Austerity measures around the globe represent political crimes of equal, if not greater, magnitude than Watergate.”

David McNally: The mutating crisis of global capitalism, Part 1 (July 12, 2010) + Part 2: The human recession (July 13, 2010)
“My view is that this is the first global and systemic crisis of the neoliberal phase of capitalism. When I say it’s systemic, I mean that it’s not just a crisis in one sector. It’s not just a real estate or housing crisis. It’s not just a banking crisis. It is a systemic crisis.”

A crisis made by neoliberalism (November 10, 2009)
“Michael Yates and Fred Magdoff have collaborated on a new book, The ABCs of the Economic Crisis: What Working People Need to Know, that provides a concise and accessible account of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, and why it happened. Mike Whitney interviewed Yates and Magdoff about their book.”

Ashley Smith: Can Marxism explain the financial crash? (April 13, 2009)
“Two veteran socialists [John Bellamy Foster and Fred Magdoff] have written a new book identifying the causes of the economic meltdown in capitalism’s in-built tendency toward crisis.”

Solidarity

Video: On Marx and the global economic crisis (April 17-19, 2009)
“Anwar Shaikh, Professor at the New School for Social Research, gives a Marxist account of historic fluctuations in the capitalist economy and how the current crisis fits in the overall picture.”

Video: On Marx and the global economic crisis (April 17-19, 2009)
“David McNally, Professor at York University and leading member of the New Socialist Group, talks about the roots of the the financial crisis and its precise role in the worldwide economic downturn.”

State of Nature

Minqi Li: Global imbalances, peak oil, and the next global economic crisis (Winter 2011)
“After about 2020, both of the world’s two largest economies will lose the capacity to function either as the world’s lender of last resort or the world’s borrower of last resort. This will leave the neoliberal global economy in a fundamentally unstable condition.”

UCLA: Center for Social Theory and Comparative History

Robert Brenner: What is good for Goldman Sachs is good for America: the origins of the current crisis (pdf) (18 April 2009, 73 p.). Also online at Verso/Blog (13 November 2018).
“This text appears as the Prologue to the Spanish translation of the author’s Economics of Global Turbulence (Verso, 2006) which was published by Akal in May 2009.”

R. Taggart Murphy: In the eye of the storm: Updating the Economics of Global Turbulence, an introduction to Robert Brenner’s update (The Asia-Pacific Journal, December 7, 2009)

Robert Brenner and the current crisis (pdf) (Permanent Revolution, Issue 15, Winter 2010, p.29-36)
“Bill Jefferies lays bare some fundamental flaws in Brenner’s understanding of the world economy in a review of a recent paper.”

Weekly Worker

Michael Roberts: Ten years later (Issue 1167, August 10, 2017). “What has the bourgeoisie learnt from the 2007-08 crash? Not a great deal.”

Hillel Ticktin: The theory of capitalist disintegration (Issue 880, September 8, 2011)
“More and more people are saying, ‘Marx was right’. But can the present crisis of capitalism be explained by the tendency for the rate of profit to fall, famously discussed by Marx? Profits are high and there is a massive overaccumulation of capital.”

Head-in-the-sand capitalism and the tasks of the left (Issue 761, March 19, 2009)
“The current downturn has been compared to the great depression. Peter Manson spoke to Hillel Ticktin, editor of Critique, about the prospects for the left and what can be expected from the G20.”

Theme: Marxist economists analyse the crisis (March to June 2008 + December 2008 onwards)
“Robert Brenner, Andrew Kliman and David Laibman are new contributors, and Michel Husson, Fred Moseley, Leo Panitch, and Costas Lapavitsas present second thoughts, in a symposium also including Simon Mohun, Trevor Evans, and Dick Bryan.”